What would you pay to live in Minato Ward?
It was in 2001 when my friend, Chikako Sakamoto, paid ¥9.8 million for a six-tatami-mat apartment in Tokyo's central Minato Ward. The apartment was inside a 長期滞在者用 (chōki taizaisha-yō, long term resident's) wing of an old hotel in Roppongi, with a very low ceiling ...
OK Google, auto-fill the gaps in my Japanese
If you are stuck for what to say in Japanese, Google search — and in particular, its auto-fill function — can be your friend.
Musical vocab in Japanese can be a maddeningly multilingual minefield
A basic grounding in German, English, Italian and Heian Period poetry could be useful for those interested in reading and talking about the mechanics of music in Japan.
A company freshman's sharp learning curve
The first Monday in April — April 2 this year — sees tens of thousands of 生き生きして元気な新入社員 (ikiiki shite genki na shinnyū shain, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed newly hired company employees) — also referred to as フレシュマン (fureshuman, freshmen) — decked out in their new ...
Japanese women find strength in Me Too
The Me Too movement has arrived in Japan at last, and more Japanese women are opening up about issues surrounding sexual harassment.
In written Japanese, it's punctuation, but not as we know it
Needless to say, Japanese has its own set of punctuation marks, and a number of special rules regarding their usage.
Cheat your way to better Japanese with walkthrough video game guides
Learners of Japanese, why not try offsetting the guilt of cheating at video games by changing your device's settings to Nihongo and checking Japanese online walkthrough guides?
Putting Japan's Olympic success into words
Team Japan amassed 13 medals in Pyeongchang, its best ever Winter Games medal haul.
One way to acquire more kanji is to organize them into a relational database. To show how this works, let's look at some of the many characters using the hand radical.
A salaryman is left blinking in the dust left by the #MeToo charge
One Japanese salaryman laments the changes the #MeToo movement has had on relationships between men and women in his workplace.
Learning Japanese from TV samurai tales of the wild East
Portraying legendary heroes in colorful costumes of yore, jidaigeki (period dramas) date back to the earliest years of silent films, and the genre has been frequently compared with America's TV Westerns.
Yonkoma manga: Lives told, lessons learned in four frames
The internet has provided would-be manga artists with an easy way to publish their own yonkoma (four-frame manga), resulting in a wide variety of different stories that are easily accessible and free.
